In Big Trouble

there was blood. Would you like to go to lunch?'

'Excuse me?' Tess had thought she was bad about jumping from topic to topic, but Emmie's synapses were misfiring like the cheap caps that kids play with on the sidewalk.

'Lunch. Aren't you hungry? Ed said you could eat a lot. You know what? I'm going to start calling him Crow. It suits him.'

'Does Crow talk about me often?'

Emmie gave this serious consideration. 'Not so very often. Sometimes. When it's so late that it's early, and we've played really well, so we're all drained, and he's had a couple drinks maybe, and we go to Earl Abel's for pie, and the sun is just coming up-his memories come up, too. Is it true you ate the same thing for breakfast every day?'

'Well, not every day.'

'Do you think that means you're naturally monogamous?'

'What?'

Emmie held her fingers to her mouth, as if to taste the blood rimmed beneath her fingernails. 'I would think someone who could eat the same thing for breakfast every day would be pretty dependable. Then again, maybe that's the kind of person who just loses it, you know. Goes postal, burns down the house, hits the road because she suddenly realizes she can't face another bowl of Frosted Flakes. So, do you want to go to lunch or what?'

'Why not?' At least it was a question she understood.

Tess wasn't sure where she had expected Emmie to take her to eat, but this lunch counter at the old- fashioned drugstore, the Olmos Pharmacy, was a pleasant surprise.

'Get a milkshake,' Emmie instructed her. 'They're the best in the world.'

'My grandfather made the best shakes in the world, at his lunch counter.' But Tess added a shake to her order of grilled cheese and bacon. She had never seen a milkshake served this way: The counter woman set small plastic tumblers of whipped cream in front of them, then left behind the sweating metal container from the old- fashioned Hamilton mixer. Emmie poured the thick concoction over the whipped cream, stirred, then dug into hers with a spoon. Although it was possible to coax the thick liquid up a straw, it wasn't very easy. A spoon was definitely the way to go.

'This was my high school hang-out,' Emmie said. 'The local malt shop. Isn't that sweet?'

'You make it sound as if that were forty years ago.'

She nodded dreamily, licking her spoon. 'It feels that way. We lived in Olmos Park, on Hermosa. Handsome street. Now here's a riddle-Can ugly things happen on a street called handsome?'

Emmie's crazy act was beginning to seem just that, an act. 'I think I drove through there. I kept ending up in Olmos Park when I was trying to find your godmother in Alamo Heights.'

'San Antonio is tricky that way.'

It sounded like a warning, but Emmie's face was all innocence as she dipped her spoon in and out of her malt. She was not what Tess expected. She couldn't say what she was exactly, just that she wasn't what Tess had expected.

'Why are we here?' Tess asked her.

'That's a pretty big question, isn't it? One of the biggies. Why are we here? The thing is, we are here, right, and we just have to make the best of it, until we're not.'

'No, why are we having lunch? Why did you come find me today? How did you find me, for that matter?'

'You told Crow you were staying at La Casita. Crow tells me everything.'

'Everything?'

'Everything I want to know. I asked him this morning if he knew where you were.'

'Why?'

'I told you. I wanted to tell you there's nothing between us. Between Crow and me.'

'Okay, I know. So what?'

'Sew buttons,' Emmie said, blowing into the straw in her water glass, making bubbles like a little kid.

'Emmie, do you know a man named Tom Darden, or Laylan Weeks?'

Tess had deliberately omitted any context with the names, but Emmie's face was a careful blank. 'No. Who are they?'

'Darden is the man I found at Marianna's place. Weeks is the person they think he was with before he died. They're from here, but they've been in prison for a pretty long time.'

Emmie put on a pretty pout of concentration, as if thinking hard. 'Did they go to Alamo Heights High School?'

'I don't think so.'

'Then I guess I don't know them.'

'Do you know what brought me here?'

'Now that's another one of those big questions, isn't it?'

Tess pulled the clipping of Crow from her datebook. 'I know now this was cut out of an old newspaper ad, and the headline is nothing more than a fragment of the band's old name. But it doesn't mean he isn't in big trouble. He sent me this for a reason.'

'You think Crow sent this to you?'

'Who else?'

Emmie sucked her metal spoon clean, then tried to hang it from her nose. It fell to the counter with a noisy clatter. 'It never works with these spoons. I don't know why I keep trying.'

'Is he in big trouble, Emmie? Are you?'

'I'm fine,' she said sharply.

'Did something happen while you were staying at Marianna's place?'

'No.' She gulped the last of her shake. 'I have to go. We've got a late night tonight. I need to catch a few hours of sleep.'

'You playing the Morgue again?'

Emmie nodded. 'But on Saturdays, we have an after-hours gig in this really cool place, Hector's. It's like a shack under the highway and most of die people who hang out there are bikers. But a lot of people come there just to hear us now. We're not the Breakfast Club there, we're Las Almas Perdidas. The Lost Souls.'

'Not more eighties music?'

'Original stuff. And covers, done in a conjunto style, with a little bluegrass mixed in. You'd be surprised how an accordion and a fiddle can make an old song sound new again.'

Yes, Tess would. 'Well, let's get me back to La Casita, so you can have your siesta.'

'When are you going back to Baltimore?'

'Not sure.' She was less sure of everything, the more time she spent here. 'Do you want me to leave, Emmie? Is that the point of this excursion? Or are you trying to figure out if I know anything?'

'I just wanted to talk to you a little. I feel as if I know you. I know you and Crow knows-actually, he doesn't know as much as he thinks he does. But that's another story, for another day.'

They drove back to La Casita in Emmie's little Nissan Sentra, not the type of car Tess would have picked for a crazy rich girl. Emmie was an unexpectedly competent driver, too, focused and aggressive, with none of the dreaminess or abrupt shifts that characterized her conversation. Tess alternated between studying Emmie and studying the landmarks. She was beginning to get her bearings.

'It's like a bow-legged woman,' she said.

'What?' Emmie asked, for once the one caught off guard.

'San Antonio. It's laid out like a bow-legged woman with her legs crossed at the ankles. That's how the parallel streets of Broadway and McCullough come to intersect. Here on Hildebrand, we're about waist-high. Now that I understand that, I think I'll be able to get around better.'

'Sure, on the north side. But there's more to San Antonio than the north side. The streets and highways around here are like dividing cells. They come together and break apart, they change names abruptly. Don't be fooled into thinking it's an easy city to know.'

But when they stopped at the next traffic light, Emmie glanced over at Tess, and seemed to take pity on her. It